Thursday, May 26, 2011

Skype collapses, panic on the Net

No attack by hackers. For the moment this is the only certainty that Skype has provided about 800 million users worldwide using VoIP, (voice over Internet protocol) for their phone calls and chats. The announcement was made through the Twitter profile of the software a few hours after the collapse that occurred during the early morning hours.

"Some of you might not be able to access Skype and make calls: we are investigating and hope to have details to share as soon as possible," explained the engineers on the social network. After thanking you for your patience, within an hour's computer had already posted the first option, pending other more simple to remedy the problem, with many different and specific, depending on the operating system of computers.

Meanwhile, the network, Mashable to Webnews up to social networks, had shared the information available. The fall, as the tweet, involving almost every part of the world, although patchy: in the same office a few accounts were inaccessible, while others worked fine. News circulated on the Internet, rchieste help and possible solutions in virtually every language in the world: from the German to the greek or Japanese.

Some people took the opportunity to launch some stab against the company created in 2003 by Zennstrom and Friis: "The crash is global. Now you know that this is a Microsoft product. " Or: "It does not work? Symptom of everything that Microsoft puts his hands up. " Jokes that refer to the recent news of the acquisition by the telephone giant Bill Gates, who was forced to give up because of debts to the IPO.

Despite the irony, Skype is not new to the problem. A malfunction of the same magnitude also occurred last December. In that case the fall was due to updates of "supernodes". As the blogger explains Andre Beggi in one of his post, "Skype uses an architecture called a" supernode P2P ", through which all communications are managed.

Rather than a large central server, clients interact with each other, to support the network. The participation of the client to the Skype network is the means by which the network sustains itself. " If you block one of these supernodes that "sorting" the work, the crash is served. But in this case Skype is not yet capable of explaining the incident (at the moment are still investigating not only on the cause, but also the extent of harm to users).